I have the relationship between Color and Game working well through GameColor; I can save/update in a game with no issues. What I am trying to do now is to build an association with one of the colors in the game_colors collection in game to the Image model.

There will be multiple Image instances that will have the same color associated with it. I feel like this is doable from reading through the associations docs but I'm still new to Rails and can't figure out the exact method.

If you suggestions for alternative ways to model this I'd love to hear that as well.

You haven't really described your requirements and use cases so it is very difficult to know what you want to do

I think what you are describing is each image can have only a single colour

An image can be re-used in multiple games? If an image has a game as it's foreign key this is not possible! so I assume I have that wrong

Anyway the answer to your immediate problem is to associate the image with the game_color on a has_one and belongs_to relationship. I don;t know enough about your requirements to say which way the belongs_to should be

Tip

When designing your database think only about the database not about the code